| inbluevt | Date: Monday, 2013/10/07, 11:09 AM | Message # 1 | DMCA |
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The reception room at the Echo of Moscow radio station—a famous hangout of Russia’s intelligentsia—was crowded and tense. With just minutes to go before a talk show devoted to the Russian criminal court system, guests crowded around an elegant woman who was the evening’s
star: Tamara Morshakova, a retired judge, professor, former deputy head of the Russian Constitutional Court, member of President Vladimir Putin’s human-rights council, and one of the prime targets of a spurious witch-hunt by the Kremlin.
Morshakova’s story has been the talk of Moscow for the past few weeks, ever since the Investigative Committee—Russia’s toughest law enforcement organization—questioned her for two days for her alleged involvement in the so-called “Case of Experts.” The convoluted case
involves allegations that academics, judges, and social activists received foreign funds to secretly push for liberalization and to convince the government to be lenient on jailed former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Many of the Kremlin’s critics have fled the country after similar
interrogations by the Investigative Committee, to escape the threat of prison. Meanwhile, the irony of the role reversal in Morshakova’s case escaped no one: the woman who had once ruled the court system with an iron fist was now being threatened by it at the final stage of her
career.
But Morshakova is determined to stay in Russia, despite the fact that, as she calmly told the Echo of Moscow crowd, “the authorities consider me the leader of an organized criminal gang.”
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Message edited by inbluevt - Monday, 2013/10/07, 11:12 AM |
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